“I am not a historian. I work with paradigms. A paradigm is something like an example, an exemplar, a historically singular phenomenon. As it was with the panopticon for Foucault, so is the Homo Sacer or the Muselmann or the state of exception for me. And then I use this paradigm to construct a large group of phenomena and in order to understand an historical structure, again analogous with Foucault, who developed his ‘panopticism’ from the panopticon. But this kind of analysis should not be confused with a sociological investigation.”
Interview with Ulrich Raulff, German Law Journal 5(5): 609-614.
